"A good day for the Marine Corps"

From the Powerline blog:

Michael Ledeen highlights this stirring account of Marines fighting in Afghanistan:

FARAH PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- In the city of Shewan, approximately 250 insurgents ambushed 30 Marines and paid a heavy price for it.

World Health Organisation abandons the "gold standard" of scientific evidence

The march of unreason and superstition continues.

We slide that little bit further toward the abyss.

The deep cultural scepsis and crisis of confidence that has been eating away at the West for much of the last hundred years or so further erodes the foundations of what has been the greatest single human achievement of all time.

A way of approaching the world that has created societies where unparalleled levels of prosperity and health are shared by a greater proportion of "ordinary" people than any before.

And we are in the process of throwing it all away!

It's not just science, but the whole manifestation of what the Enlightenment bequeathed to us.

How did we get to this point?

Central to this I feel is a sense of confidence. Confidence about the future and the ability of people to think their way through challenges and in the end make things better.

Modern "deep-green" environmentalism, one of the bastard children of 19th Century Romanticism, represents one form of the loss of this confidence in people and the future.

The modern world, with its science and machines and change is feared and hated. The real world is no longer a source of wonder and promise, sufficient in and of itself.

Instead increasing numbers of people want to believe in anything but reality.

Whether it's the various types of so-called complimentary medicine such as naturopathy, homeopathy and the other quack remedies that separate the naive and the stupid from their money, or the infantile idealisation of tribal societies over our own.

I never cease to be amazed to read in the newspapers people going on about the wonderful peaceful aboriginal culture that existed here until evil white people arrived.

What? Name a single primitive tribal culture that wasn't a violent patriarchal warrior culture where violence, both within the tribe and between tribes, wasn't the norm?

Oh, that's right. You can't. Because no such thing has ever existed. Leaving aside Patrick Dodson's bizarre fantasising about traditional aboriginal life of a bit of sleeping, a bit of hunting and then a bit of playing with the kids, the facts tell another story.

But then that returns us to the core of the problem. We increasingly don't want facts anymore. All that dreary evidence stuff is just so inconvenient.

We don't care that even the first British settlers in this country were absolutely shocked at the nature of the violence meted out to aboriginal women by their own menfolk. Instead of rationally weighing the evidence of the fact that one of the features of anthropological collections of aboriginal skulls is the disproportionately large number of female skulls that were obviously fractured during life, we substitute mythological mystifications about little aboriginal boys who can stop herds of stampeding cattle simply by raising their hands.

We don't want to know about the accounts of escaped convicts who lived amongst aborigines and left us first hand descriptions of not only the viciousness of tribal warfare, (such as finishing off wounded opponents by smashing their heads in with boomerangs), but also engaging in less than environmentally sustainable practices, such as leaving netted fish considered too small to die on a riverbank.

White settlement was the second human disaster to strike this continent.

The various movements of modern human beings into the continent some 60,000 years ago was the first.

The flora and fauna that the first European settlers found just over two hundred years ago was what had survived the decimation wrought by the arrival of aboriginal people here all that time ago.

We simply continued changing the environment and driving plants and animals into extinction where they left off.

The aboriginal practice of burning the country changed the country completely. Those plants that could not cope with the now much more frequent fires disappeared from burnt areas. Many disappeared completely.

And just as it happened in other places, like the Americas, it is interesting is it not that the disappearance of large mammals (mega fauna) just happened to coincide with the arrival of aboriginal people in Australia?

But bugger the facts, we want myths and fantasy.

And we want to wallow in our own feelings of shame and failure for our crimes, real and imagined, against Mother Nature. We want to imagine some fantastical simpler and better time where a simpler and better kind of human being lived in "perfect" harmony with the natural world.

Hmmm, that's kind of sounding familiar isn't it? Sort of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden repackaged.

And thus the true nature of the environmentalism and nativism that now even infects our universities and centres of learning is revealed.

It's religion. Or a religion substitute if you prefer.

And especially it is the religion of choice of the affluent but deracinated white middle classes.

Now the international body tasked with setting international food standards has succumbed.

For many years the WHO has been under pressure from the dietary supplement industry to lower the accepted standards for testing claims made about the supposed benefits of such things.

The reason is simple. When subjected to randomised trials involving control groups not receiving the supplement - vitamins, minerals, herbs or whatever - the supplement was shown to have little or no benefit.

That is, there was little difference in the health outcomes between those taking the supplement or herbal remedy and those taking a placebo (sugar tablet).

Let's just emphasise this point. No so-called complimentary medicine or dietary supplement has ever been shown to be really effective.

St John's Wort is as good as it ever gets with these things - a very weak effect for mild depression, but nothing more.

Most however have no discernible effect and some are positively harmful, as some users of Chinese herbal medicine have found out to their cost.

No wonder the companies making these useless and ineffectual products wanted the standard of evidence reduced!

This would not have happened even 10 years ago.

But the erosion of confidence in the ability of the scientific method and rational thought to be the best tools to test competing claims has now reached such a level that even the WHO has given in.

As Sandy from Junkfood Science says, you will no longer be able to trust claims that the food you eat or the supplements you take are actually safe or efficacious, because it will no longer be necessary to prove claims, just enough for all intents and purposes to assert them.

The history and causes of the financial crisis

UPDATE from this morning's Oz:

Johan Norberg,
on his blog JohanNorberg.net, points out the Democratic intervention that caused
the financial crisis

SOME milestones in the prehistory of the crisis. 1933: As part of the New Deal, investment banks are stopped from also acting as commercial banks (which would have given them bank deposits and more stability). 1938: As part of the New Deal, president (Franklin D.) Roosevelt creates Fannie Mae and in 1970 Congress creates Freddie Mac. With their implicit government guarantees they can offer cheaper loans and expand until they dominate the American mortgage market. 1989: The American government step(s) in and pay(s) for the savings and loan crisis, which sets a precedent. 1995: The Community Reinvestment Act is revised so that banks and thrifts are forced to give home loans to low and moderate-income households as well. In return they are allowed to repackage and sell those sub-prime risks to others, which Bear Stearns pioneers in 1997. 2001-03: Instead of letting the market get rid of bad businesses and loans after the dotcom bubble and 9/11, the (Federal Reserve reduces its rate from 6.5 per cent to 1 per cent (with) a dramatic expansion of the money supply, which creates a real estate bubble.

Mae and Mac ran leverage ratios that exceeded 60 to one (cheered on by the Democrats) to keep giving loans to people who could not really afford it. It only took more traditional interest rates for the bubble to burst. The independent investment
banks that did not have access to bank deposits collapsed and almost brought the whole system down. All those who now think that the solution is to give more powers to politicians, authorities and central banks should look at what they did with the powers they already had.

While the dominant discourse has been about the greed of the banks and so-called "market failure" in relation to the sub-prime loans that seem to be the basis of the current financial crisis, are things that simple?

Greed certainly has been a factor here, but so has been well-intentioned government policy in the US.

I'll guarantee to you that, nine times out of ten, situations of so-called "market failure" are in fact the almost inevitable consequences of governments distorting markets to achieve some social, environmental or other goal which, however laudable in theory, flies in the face of economic reality.

Much of the current crisis was caused by government policy in the US to increase home ownership rates amongst minorities and low-income earners.

As I say, a laudable goal.

The genesis of this goes at least as far back as 1977 and the signing into law by President Jimmie Carter of the Community Reinvestment Act which required banks to lend to "under-served populations," ie those with poor credit ratings, or face penalties.

This was extended by Bill Clinton in 1995 with the government underwriting what would become to be known as sub-prime loans. The Clinton Administration put pressure on the mortgage underwriter Fannie Mae to increase lending to low income earners. (It's only fair though to mention though that Fannie Mae stock holders also wanted to do this to increase the phenomenal profits it was making at the time.)

As this article notes, "Now we know that Holmes and Wallison had this dead right. As long as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought subprime paper, lenders continued to profit from them, pushing them to make more and more loans to unqualified borrowers with no risk to themselves. Meanwhile, rather than manage the GSEs with fiscal discipline as first priority, Raines and his executives ran it as a political organization, looking to distort the market for political ends. When critics tried to point this out, Raines’ defenders — mostly Capitol Hill flacks raking in contributions from Fannie/Freddie sources — called critics and regulators bigots."

Indeed, one Barack Obama back in 1994 "sued Citibank on behalf of a client who charged that the bank “systematically denied mortgages to African-American applicants and others from minority neighborhoods.”" (Even though only a first term senator, Mr Obama is the second biggest receiver of funds from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is the US Senate. He chose a former head of Fannie Mae to help him pick his vice-presidential running mate and a former CEO of Freddie Mac is one of his advisors.)

But the market was already working. While more loans were still being made to white Americans, "in the previous five years, mortgages awards to Hispanics jumped 87%, to African-Americans by 71%, and Asians 46%...which proved that a rising tide [the economic boom of the 1990s] indeed lifted all boats, without government intervention to impose “fairness”."

When you have "a solution in search of a problem," you know something is wrong and is going to end badly.

So it was government intervening in and thus distorting the market, trying to legislate for "fairness," "equity," "social justice" or "social inclusion," that bears substantial responsibility for the mess that the markets are in now.

Oh - for the record. The Bush Administration proposed a substantial tightening of the regulations governing the housing finance industry back in 2003, but was opposed and stymied by congressional opposition.

In 2005 John McCain co-sponsored the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act, which amongst other things provided for more oversight of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

But Fannie and Freddie's friends defeated it, and again when it was reintroduced just last year.

I love this song!

The Minotaur by The Drones

Of computer models, the financial crisis and climate change

Excellent letter in this morning's Oz by Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University.

DAVID Murray, a former CEO of the Commonwealth Bank and chairman of the Future Fund, has rumbled ("Aussie banks to ride out storm”, 19/9) that a major cause of the current global financial crisis has been an over-reliance on complex financial computer models. Murray notes that “in the US, some of the brightest people that have come out of the greatest universities have been employed on broken models in investment banking ...”

It is the case, also, that unvalidated computer projections produced by very clever programmers are now about the only argument left to the IPCC that dangerous human-caused global warming is going to occur, leaving aside that the real world has been cooling since 2002. Meanwhile, Ross Garnaut has announced that on October 3 he will outline the shape of a future low-emissions economy for Australia. In support of the findings and recommendations in his Final Report, Garnaut will describe “one of the most ambitious and complex economic modelling projects ever undertaken in Australia”, which he claims “will describe the nature of future structural change across the economy with mitigation policies in place”.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he, but who ever is going to believe a word of it?

As this post here at Ambit Gambit observes, the tie up between the current financial melt-down and climate hysteria is the reliance by both on computer models that do not reflect the real world.

Even the IPCC admits this, and yet we are going to engage in the multi-trillion dollar upending of the global economy.

Complete madness.

The phantom epidemic of child diabetes

Very interesting post from Junkfood Science.

The URL is http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/09/phantom-epidemic-of-child-diabetes.html

It appears that we have another "informational cascade" occurring in the US, just as we do here.

To remind you, an informational cascade is the ability of false and poorly evidenced information to gain credibility through being repeatedly retold as being true and correct.

It's the medical and scientific version of the urban myth, as discussed recently by the science writer of The New York Times.

So how exactly did it it happen that the false claim that there had been a ten-fold increase in the levels of type 2 diabetes amongst children in the USA gain currency and start to shape health reporting and policy there, when the July issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found that rates over the last 20 years have remained steady?

And steady at very low rates. No more than a fraction of a percentage point.

As far as I can see, one of the reasons is our old statistical friend, the unrepresentative sample. So results from a study of a group of people who do not mirror the general population are nonetheless used as the base from which to extrapolate findings to the population at large.

Any innumerate idiot should be able to see the problem with this I would have thought.

But we live in an age beset by white middle-class panics, and one of the most shrill and hysterical (other than climate change) is obesity, and especially childhood obesity.

There's another false belief being put about widely at the moment, ie that obesity must be causing the increase in diabetes amongst children and young people.

But does that hard data support this view? Yet again, the answer is no.

Now, middle-class panics inevitably mutate into moral crusades. The trouble with moral crusades is that reason is one of their first casualties as what should be a rational issue decided by evidence is turned into a fight between good and evil.

Obesity is "evil" and must be the cause of all manner of afflictions and to dare say otherwise is not just to be wrong, a difference of opinion, but evil too.

And then there are the "availability entrepreneurs." Those who stand to profit in some way by stoking the fire. Unfortunately there are all too many health bureaucrats and academics who have built high profile and well paid careers from this sort of thing, and who are not going to let an opportunity to jump on the next funding bandwagon pass them by.

And all at a time when the most basic measure of our health continues its upward march.

Our lifespans.

We are living longer than ever before. And not just longer. Healthier too. All the actual data points overwhelmingly to this, and yet we are assailed on a daily basis about how our diets and additives and chemicals and what not are sending us all to an early grave.

It doesn't add up or make sense does it?

When advertising comes back to haunt you...

So Iraq was about US control of the oil, right?

But, but, but ... didn’t the US invade Iraq so it could steal all its oil? Iraq has signed its first major oil deal with a foreign company since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry said Saturday… The contract with the China National Petroleum Corporation could be worth up to $3 billion.

read more | digg story

Turkeys voting for Christmas

That's the mad world we're living in.

But before we get to the insane plans to destroy the Australian economy for no good reason, here's the latest psychiatric illness that has been diagnosed (I kid you not):

In the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital write:

We describe a patient with climate change delusion, a previously unreported phenomenon. A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an 8 month history of depressed mood… He also ...had visions of apocalyptic events…

The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of ‘millions of people’ through exhaustion of water supplies. He quoted ‘internet research’ to substantiate this. The
patient described that ‘I feel guilty about it’, had attempted to stop drinking… He was unable to acknowledge that the belief was unreasonable when challenged.

Hmm, "unable to acknowledge that the belief was unreasonable when challenged." Sounds like the perfect Greens candidate.

But onwards, things get crazier! Despite there being no global warming for a decade now (sorry folks, but that's what all four global temperature data sets say), and indeed a sharp drop in average global temperature over the past 18 months (don't believe me? That's what all the data sets have recorded), we're setting out on a course to drive up the cost of just about everything and damage our international competitiveness to supposedly "lead" the fight on climate change.

What naive suckers we'd have to be to fall for this nonsense.

Even if you shut down Australia completely tomorrow - got rid of everybody and everything - the total reduction in global anthropogenic greenhouse gasses would be at most only 1.5%.

That's all.

To put this into even sharper perspective, the world's production of such gasses is expected to grow by a whopping 50% by 2030, and China alone in 2050 will be producing as much emissions as the entire world does today.

Then there's India.

There's a whole world of pointless and futile economic pain being planned for us, which of course will hit the most vulnerable hardest. And the penny is starting to drop I think, as Andrew Bolt observes:

I suspect the coal-mining members of the Left-wing CFMEU are finally figuring that the global-warming preachers leading their union are just turkeys voting for Christmas:

There was no division in Gippsland when it came to the electoral booths affected by brown-coal mining - that is the dirtiest coal - because they all voted against Labor, including traditional ALP booths.

But what about all those lovely "green" jobs we've been promised? Don't hold your breath. Have a look at what's happening in the UK and be very sceptical the next time some snake-oil merchant says "renewable energy" to you:

Wind power would be too unreliable to meet Britain’s electricity needs, according to a new report… It comes after the Government last week unveiled a £100 million plan to build at least 4,000 wind turbines, with a further 3,000 offshore. The programme is expected to drive household bills up by £260 a year…

Using wind data from the Met Office, researchers found that in January, when energy demand is highest, wind farms often fail to produce enough electricity, dropping on occasion to 4 per cent of their maximum output. Backup fossil fuel plants would need to be switched on and off to make up the shortfall in supplies - a highly inefficient process that would reduce any carbon savings from wind farms....

In January 2005, ... a 1,000MW fossil fuel plant would have had to come on and offline a total of 23 times to make up the shortfall. At 6pm on February 2 2006 - the point of peak electricity demand for the whole year - wind farms would have been unable to provide any power at all, researchers found.

I'll let Andrew have the last word: The lunatics are in charge.

Hansen’s prediction: a cool 20 years later

Andrew Bolt fact checks a climate alarmist 20 years on.

read more | digg story

Critical alert for all women: Statins during pregnancy

Someone must have sent out a press release, because there was no new study... or any study at all to support the sudden appearance of this public health message... yet, news outlets across the UK and around the world all reported this story, all on the same day.

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Also, have a read of what Sandy has to say about the recent "Sumo" baby scare.

What Not To Crochet

As a small hint…
When your Dacshund is ashamed to be seen with you,
you may have overdone it.

This blog is brilliant! Every page contains something that is just jaw-droppingly terrible.

Want to look like a doily? Of course you do! So why not also get the Musical Birdhouse & Flower Doily? No reason not to.

Crocheted Y-fronts or G-strings? Tampon cozies? A wall of crocheted penises? (Though apparently that one was "art".)

And there's fashion a plenty for the young or the young at heart!

How about a squid to wear around your neck?

You may as well check out Extreme Craft while you are at it. See "Death and Taxidermy."

Welcome to the petrol prices warmenists demanded

Andrew Bolt - The global-warming-preaching Sunday Age now deplores the high petrol prices it’s always wanted: MOTORISTS face petrol prices of up to $1.70 a litre within days and could be paying more than $1.80 a litre by next month...

read more | digg story

Halp us we R stuck hear on ise

I've pinched this picture from the wonderfully funny Knowledge is Power , but I pointed them to the article, so I hope that makes it okay.

I am on the bridge of the massive Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov, and the tension is palpable. We have hit ice - thick ice. We are travelling from the northeastern corner of Russia, across the Bering Sea and the top of Canada to Resolute Bay in Nunavut. At least that’s the plan. We haven’t even reached Canadian waters and we are already in trouble.

The ice master studies the mountains of white packed around the ship while the 24,000-horsepower diesel engines work at full throttle to open a path. The ship rises slowly onto the barrier of ice, crushes it and tosses aside blocks the size of small cars as if they were ice cubes in a glass. It creeps ahead a few metres, then comes to a halt, its bow firmly wedged in the ice. After doing this for two days, the ship can go no farther.............

Originally sourced from Greenie Watch.

Corrections made to Tim Lambert

(From Andrew Bolt) JF Beck does something very embarrassing to global warming alarmist Tim Lambert. Presuming, of course, that Lambert is embarrassable. John Quiggin is collateral damage. Tim Blair has a fine forehand, too.

read more | digg story

The Great Barrier Reef and the prophets of doom

Even the more extreme model projections only depict tropical oceanic warming still well within the limits that thriving reefs tolerate.

read more | digg story

NBC News confuses the Antarctic with the Arctic

Penguins don't live in the Arctic.

read more digg story

But this does just about sum up the standard quality of science and environmental reporting these days.

Will vitamins cure you or kill you?

Another must read report from Sandy of the Junkfood Science blog.

Interesting that the "bad" information about vitamins cuts both ways and this says a lot about how the media always has a tendency to hype and distort issues.

I was almost going to write "complex issues", but in this case there isn't much complexity.

For healthy people with reasonable diets there is absolutely no evidence at all that vitamin supplaments have any health benefit. Zero. None. Yader.

And a well conducted meta-analysis of a large number of studies conclusively shows this.

But unfortunately this got picked up in the media, (admittedly with some help from the authors of the study), and transmuted into “Vitamins may shorten your life!”

As Sandy shows, the study's data in no way supports such a conclusion. Other than for Vitamin A, people's self-dosing with vitamins may be a pointless waste of money, but it is not doing them any harm.

The Top 25 Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians

#25. Chuck Klosterman

He Is:
A Pop-culture obsessed and farm-raised hipster who writes for GQ and ESPN.

Looks Like:

Someone who has penned 14 books on the spiritual nature of the vulva.

#17.
Masi Oka

He is:

Actor. Time Magazine whiz kid. Reported I.Q. of 180 (same as cast of Carpoolers).

Looks Like:

An author of a paper stating sex with a man is, by definition, a hate crime.

#11.
Richard Butler

He Is:

The Molly-Ringwald-serenading lead singer of the Psychedelic Furs.

Looks Like:

The co-founder of online erotic products store exclusively for lesbians, "Toys for Twats."

You get the idea. Full list here.

Academic cool on warming | The Australian

RESPECTED academic Don Aitkin has seen the ugly side of the climate change debate after being warned he faced demonisation if he challenged the accepted wisdom that global warming poses a danger to humanity.Professor Aitkin told The Australian yesterday he had been told he was "out of his mind" by some in the media...

read more | digg story